


Luck's a Chance, But Trouble's Sure

by summerstorm



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Blindfolds, Community: kink_bingo, Exposure, F/M, Fear Play, Obedience, Post-2.03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-14
Updated: 2010-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-12 16:05:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/126659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerstorm/pseuds/summerstorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Established-relationship PWP. <i>"You should try to scare me," Matt asks Caroline.</i> Caroline always acts like she was never turned into a vampire around Matt. Matt thinks he should be aware of the things she keeps from him, if only so he'll be able to handle them if they ever find themselves in a situation where he has to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Luck's a Chance, But Trouble's Sure

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this partly on a whim and partly for this month's kink-bingo mini-challenge, using 'silence' as my one-kink-two-fanworks kink, but then it swerved pretty far off from that, so I'm counting it towards my 'obedience' square instead. Title from A.E. Housman.

"You should try to scare me," Matt asks Caroline. He's been thinking about it for a while, and now seems like a good time to mention it, while they're having dinner at his house.

Well, dinner. They were both having human-type food a short time ago, but then Caroline said she was 'hungry, like vampire hungry' with this beautiful sheepish half-smile, and he figured if he was dating a vampire, he might as well get used to her drinking habits. He knows she only does animal blood, and that keeping that kind of diet means she's never not a little bit hungry. He doesn't want that little bit to become a lot. Ever. It would make it harder for Caroline to keep herself in check, and he doesn't want to be the cause of that. That was the whole point of convincing her to keep a bottle of blood in his fridge—an opaque bottle—and it would defeat the point if she had to wait for him to get out of the room to drink it.

He draws the line at watching her drain out rabbits or squirrels or whatever it is she hunts and feeds on, but this. This is fine.

"I told you this wasn't a good idea," Caroline says, putting her mug down. "Now you're staring at me and getting weird ideas."

"I'm only staring because you're drinking—you know, _blood_ from a Winnie the Pooh mug," he points out. "Which you just heated up in the microwave. It's so incongruous, it's. It's funny."

"I'll give you incongruous," Caroline says, rolling her eyes, but it's all talk. She does raise the mug back to her lips, though, so maybe not entirely.

"Okay, here. If you look hard enough," he says, gesturing at the mug with his eyes until she holds it at eye level between them, giving him a long-suffering, blank look, "there's a metaphor there."

"I thought you were drinking water."

"I am. I'm not hallucinating. I'm just saying, if you're the blood in the mug, and I'm—"

Caroline eyes the mug and cracks a smirk. "Winnie the Pooh?"

"—the bear, it's my metaphor, let me finish," he says, failing to hold back a smile. "If you're the blood, and I'm the bear, then there's, you know, that—wall—"

"The mug?"

"—that wall that is the mug between us, so that I—that is, the bear—won't get—dirty."

"I think you just missed the entire point of all the glassware on the planet," Caroline says, still smirking. "Impressive."

Matt shakes his head and leans over the table, looking straight at her. "What I'm _saying_ is," he enunciates, "we should bring that wall down."

The smirk disappears from her lips to give way to a frown, and then her eyes widen. "No. Please tell me you're not asking me to turn you. Because I won't do it. I'm not. No. Don't even think about it."

"No, no," Matt says, "I already told you: I want you to try and scare me."

Caroline lets out a long, relieved sigh, bringing home her point. Her completely pointless point. It's kind of amazing how strongly she feels about it, but then again, Caroline does feel strongly about a lot of things, and turning someone into a vampire is way more major than most of them. "Okay. Okay, that sounds—doable, I guess, or it would if you told what the hell you mean by that."

"You act human," he says, "around me."

"I'm drinking blood," Caroline interrupts. "But of course I do."

"Most of the time. But there's more there. Even if you don't go—don't turn into anything dangerous, don't turn your—your humanity off, or however that goes, there's still more there. You can run faster than my eyes can follow, and sneak up on people, and you could probably hold up heavy furniture one-handed. And I've never seen your—your teeth, when your face changes."

Caroline bites her lip. "You have," she says. "You just don't remember. And trust me, it's a really good thing that only happened once."

"For this particular purpose, not remembering is exactly like never having seen you like that."

"I just don't see why you'd want to."

"Because I _might_ ," he says, "at some point, I might, and I don't want it to be a surprise. I don't want to—I want to know what it's like, being on the other end, before it happens by accident or you have to do it or any other way."

There's a moment of silence: Caroline seems to be considering it, which is actually more than Matt expected to get the first time he ran the idea by her, but it's by no means an unwanted surprise.

"Okay," she says, "right, so what would that involve, exactly?"

"Anything... new. Anything potentially freaky or scary. You're faster than me, you have ninja moves, Caroline. You're stronger than me. Your face does that thing when you're hungry, with the fangs and the veins around the eyes? I want to get used to it, know it doesn't necessarily mean danger from you."

"You know it's a lot easier to stay in control than to lose it and get it back, right?"

"I just want to be ready," Matt says, one last time. "I don't want to freak out at anything that's a part of—of you, and that you have under control."

"Okay," Caroline says, and vanishes.

When Matt looks around the room, she's nowhere to be seen. It's—fast, and unexpected, but this is what he wanted, getting used to her, to being caught by surprise in a supernatural way, so. He can't tell her to stop and wait and plan it, even if the house is silent and his heart rate's spiking up. It's kind of an adrenaline rush, too, besides the nervousness, having no idea where Caroline is or where and when and how she's going to show up even as he stands and takes another look around himself.

He wonders if he should look for her anywhere or just wait, but it's something of a self-answering question: it would be a pretty hypocritical move to try to anticipate her, considering. He does move to the living room, because, though also tiny, it feels less claustrophobic than his kitchen, but beyond that, he's in her hands.

He eyes the couch, the television. He doesn't know how long Caroline's going to be out, or even if she's coming back tonight. There are a couple of DVDs on top of the TV that he doesn't remember leaving there, so he walks over to pick them up.

His hand hasn't even reached them before both his arms get pinned to his back. His stomach jumps at the sudden intrusion, but he doesn't startle outwardly. "Caroline."

"Hi," she says. She really is strong: his arms are practically locked in place. "This is a confirmation, uh—pop-up. I guess."

He laughs. "Okay. What does that mean?"

"It means you have stupid ideas and I'm dangerous and you need to think about this carefully," Caroline says.

"I have." He wouldn't have suggested it otherwise. "You may find this hard to believe, but I trust you to not kill me."

"Well, you shouldn't," she says, but she sounds like she's smiling. "You really shouldn't. But I'll be back before dawn."

"What do you mean _before dawn_?" he asks, but she's already gone.

He does manage to pick out a DVD and pop it in this time.

An hour later, Caroline's still gone, and he has to blow Tyler off when he calls with a _Caroline's coming by. I think_ that probably sounds even less credible on the phone than it does in his own ears.

Two hours later, the movie's over, and Caroline has yet to show any signs she's coming back.

He's not tired, but he's hungry, so he gets up and scans his kitchen for snacks. He finds a box of microwaveable popcorn in the front of a cupboard and sticks a bag in the microwave. There's corn grains somewhere, he's pretty sure, which he actually likes better as popcorn than the microwaveable kind, but there's no saying Caroline won't pop up in a way that gets him burned, so he goes for the safe option. When the oven pings, he empties the bag into a large plastic bowl and sets it out on the coffee table in the living room before falling back onto the couch, rubbing the settling boredom off his eyes.

When he gets another look at the bowl, there's a hand in it.

Not, like, a severed hand—Caroline's hand. Which is attached to the rest of her body.

"I didn't hear you come in," Matt says, leaning forward onto his elbows and looking up. He's suddenly thankful for Caroline's habit of _knocking_ instead of creeping in through windows or forcing the front door open, but it feels like something he should learn to not be afraid of, at least not when it's Caroline doing it.

It definitely surprises him, seeing her there, but deep down he was expecting her, so he doesn't take long to recover. It's much less startling to see her at a distance and stuffing her mouth with popcorn at a perfectly human speed than it was to be basically ambushed and immobilized without so much as _hello_.

Caroline cocks her head and presses her lips together, breathing in and releasing air like there's a furious debate going on in her head. "I've been here for the last hour," she says. It sounds like a begrudging confession. It's a striking one, at least.

"You have? But I didn't—"

"Exactly," Caroline says. "I never even left the house." She directs his gaze towards the TV for a moment. "I heard the first half of the movie from your room."

Matt frowns.

"Yeah. Didn't understand the Russian, because I couldn't, like, see the subtitles from there, but yeah." She's looking at him expectantly now, but he has no idea what she wants him to say. She didn't make a sound. He paused the movie a few times and the house was completely silent.

"Okay," he says, meaninglessly. It seems like the polite thing to do, acknowledging what someone said even if you still need some time to process it.

Something flares across Caroline's face, something like resolve breaking down, and she says, quickly, "I know it's a super creepy thing to do, and I don't plan on doing it again, ever, but—"

"I asked," he says. He did. That's what he needed to say.

"Yep," Caroline says, though her next breath still sounds like a mild regretful hiss.

"Okay," says Matt again, this time meaning it. "So what's next?"

"Well, since you asked," Caroline replies, and grabs a blue scarf out of the back of her shorts, letting it roll down in front of her. "I think I want you to go to your room and put this on."

"You think you want—" he echoes, a little baffled.

Caroline lets out a long-suffering sigh. "Okay, Matt, this is like, a training thing, right?"

"Yeah," he says, still not sure where this fits in with the scarf.

"You want me to try to scare you under certain circumstances, like that you know it's a part of your request and not me trying to kill you on some kind of whim."

"If you think it would be easier for you if I didn't expect it—I didn't say you had to do it now."

"No," says Caroline, leaving no room for debate. She decided that for him, is what he gets from that attitude. Chances are she's not willing to be in a situation where he's afraid of _her_ instead of her weird vampire superpowers, that she wants to see fear on his face about as much as he wants to see self-loathing and guilt on hers, so it's not a point he's going to argue. "It's a contrived situation," she goes on, "and you rules state that I dictate the rules within that contrived situation. So—go to your room, stand somewhere and put this on." She hands the scarf out to him, and he stands up to take it. It's light cotton, not too hot, but it's still a scarf, and it's still the end of summer.

"Why do you want me to put on a scarf?"

"What—ugh," Caroline says, wincing at herself. "You'd think I'd be better at giving orders, what with the compulsion and all the event planning."

"Different situation," Matt offers.

"Yeah," Caroline agrees, softly, and lifts her chin in what he believes is a gesture of power. It fails at conveying any authority at all, but it's kind of endearing, and it does make him want to do whatever she says. "I meant put the scarf over your eyes. Like a blindfold." She gasps. "Unless you have, like, some kind of phobia of—"

"I'm good," he assures her. "You want me to stand anywhere in particular?" He should feel weirder about taking orders from his girlfriend. It's not like he's never worked under her leadership before, but this is different, and they've never done anything like it before. It feels like being willing to go with it and casually asking for details is the wrong reaction, but he doesn't have any others.

"I could just move you when you're done with the blindfold," Caroline says, smiling apologetically.

"I can follow instructions."

He turns the TV off and gets a last look at Caroline before heading for his bedroom. By the time he stops walking and stands, as instructed, at the foot of his bed, he's lost track of her presence entirely. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, then, and wraps the scarf twice around his head, tying it as tightly and effectively as he can. It takes three tries for the scarf to stay put in a way that doesn't leak a thin line of brightness through the point where the fabric curls over his nose, but he gets there.

Caroline feels even more distant, somehow, when he gets used to the darkness. It's unnerving, the way he can't hear her move around the house. He hasn't forgotten what she was like before she turned when he had her over, and there were always heels or rummaging or things creaking under her weight. Right now, there is nothing. He knows she's there, rationally, but he just can't tell.

"Hi," he hears behind him, and he jumps.

"Jesus." His bed squeaks, mattress shifting noticeably where it's lined up against the back of his knees, but she was already on it when she spoke, and he didn't feel it move at all. As far as he knows, she can't make herself weightless, so she must have moved so fast he missed the sounds, the movement because it literally wasn't there before she spoke.

Caroline laughs for a split second, breathy through her nose. "You're really cute when you startle."

"That was terrifying, the way you said that," Matt points out, deadpan. He knows it's stupid to want a vampire to scare you, but he does, and he doesn't know if that's even going to happen if Caroline keeps acting like—well, like Caroline.

"I see," Caroline says, and the scarf shifts a little over his eyes, tightens. He feels a brush of knuckles on his scalp, but it goes away instantly.

He reaches back to try and catch her hand, just to place her, but she bends his arm around his face, his chin stuck in the L of his elbow, and tugs, softly at first, just uncomfortable, and then, abruptly, so hard he nearly screams in pain.

"Don't be funny," she says, sounding nothing at all like she did a moment ago, like she has all night. It's strong and detached and it makes his body tense up. "Huh," she remarks about that, "I like that," and vanishes again.

At least he thinks she does—she's not in hearing range anymore, and there's no weight pushing down the mattress. If he didn't have a scarf over his eyes, he—probably wouldn't be able to see her, either. She was in the living room for an hour and he didn't even catch a glimpse the whole time. She's good. She has to be, he guesses—vampires are predators, after all—but it's hard to think about Caroline in those terms, and harder to expect things you would based on them from her.

He stretches the pain out of his arm, wondering if another vampire would be able to hear her right now, hear her move when Matt can't.

All he gets is silence. Not absolute silence; there are several windows still open in the house, including the one in his room, and sounds pour in constantly: cars driving past, people talking on the sidewalk, a neighbor's radio featuring a smart-, mature-sounding woman waxing poetic over trashy pop as a music genre. She makes some good points, from the bits and pieces Matt can make out.

It's still louder than anything Caroline may be doing or saying or causing to sound.

He refocuses on his surroundings. He can hear the rubbery drag of his bare feet on the floor as they shuffle, and the rougher slide of his jeans when he scratches the side of one of his knees with the other.

Then, not too far off, he hears a similar collision of fabric—something soft against something softer, plainer, like a flat surface. A hand, maybe. He knows it's Caroline, but it stops before he can confirm it, and then it's back to silence.

It stretches on for minutes. The neighbor's radio stops, but they switch on the TV, some documentary about what Matt suspects to be lions from zipping through channels earlier, but he can't tell for sure: the few direct references he catches from the voice-over commentary are things like 'the predator' and 'the mother' and 'the newborn,' which are about as helpful as hearing nothing at all.

He stops paying attention. His own breathing is loud in his ears, and he can almost hear his heartbeat, the way it taps against the inside of his neck. He's not nervous; it's a fairly normal rate his heart's going at, and that's what _makes_ him nervous, the fact that he can hear his body so well he doesn't even have to be thinking about it to catch an exhale or a swallow, to hear himself be alive.

"You still there?" he asks out loud, words slashing sharply through the silence. He takes a step forward without thinking, then rubs his hands over the front of his pockets, trying to still his legs. "Caroline?" he says, more quietly this time, so much so that the questioning inflection fizzles out alongside the volume of his voice.

A few seconds go by. It could be more than that: a minute, or two. A few seconds go by a few times, but he doesn't time them as a long stretch. They're more like a string of maybes.

A cool breeze rushes over the small of his back—she's untucked the back of his t-shirt from where it had caught inside his jeans, and he's aware of the fabric straightening itself out and dropping down again. For whatever reason, it's Caroline's hands on his hips that shock him into startling, despite the fact that he already knows she's there. It's—kind of embarrassing, because the only reason he doesn't jump is Caroline's hands are steadying him so tightly he physically can't leave the spot.

He breathes in deep, and her hands fade away.

She's playing with the hem of his shirt now. He can feel it move, leave and touch and brush his skin, and then, as abruptly as it began, she stops.

When she speaks again, her voice sounds sort of far, like she's standing on the opposite end of the room. He's not sure why she stepped so far away, but half the point of what they're doing is that he learn to accept things that don't necessarily make sense to him, so he doesn't question it specifically. All he says is, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," she says, calmly, but her voice loses that composure as she goes on, "I just, okay," and then, in a rush, "if I took your shirt off, would that be—weird? Or defeat the purpose? Because, I know you said I should try and scare you, but I don't want you to be like—I don't want you to walk away from this scarred for life or determined to file a restraining order."

"What are you— No," he says, shaking his head.

"No?"

"No, I mean. Is this turning you on?" He can't mask the surprise in his voice. In a way, he gets it: it's a charged situation, and there's this feeling in the pit of his stomach that he can't really define, a reaction to feeling powerless that's half fear, half something else entirely and that's not entirely new. He's always sort of liked giving up control—hell, Caroline tied him up a couple of times before she became a vampire. He just didn't expect her to get there first. Not in this situation.

"Yes," Caroline says quickly. "Is that weird?"

"No," he says, "it's not. If you want to turn this—it was kind of a cracked-out game anyway, and I'm. I'm okay with it, if you want to—"

"Add a disturbingly inappropriate sexual component to your training exercise?"

That's a way to put it. "Yeah."

"So..."

He cracks a smile. "I'm not saying no."

"But you will, right? If it gets creepy?"

He chuckles, the sound breaking the tension a little, and yanks his shirt off over his head, stretching the collar and shielding his face as it slides up to keep the blindfold in place. It shifts anyway, opening up a band of vision under his eyes, but the room is nearly completely dark, like Caroline drew down the blinds in case this happened. She—she doesn't need a lot of light to see, right. Another vampire thing. He catches a glimpse of her sneakers, but then it's gone, and the scarf's covering up his whole line of vision again.

He throws the shirt forward onto the floor. "I will," he says, "if you will stop breaking character."

There's a dry stomping sound, like Caroline switched her weight from foot to foot, and then her voice breaks low and steady through the room. "Who's breaking character?" Her tone is quiet and authoritative, like she knows she doesn't need to raise her voice to be heard or taken seriously, and it sends a shiver down his spine.

There's another stretch of silence.

He considers trying to sit down somewhere—it's his room, he knows it inside out, and it's too small to get lost in anyway. He'd only have to take a couple of steps back to find his bed. Still, the idea of bumping around blindly in front of Caroline is even more embarrassing than what he's doing now. Standing in the middle of his room is really not that bad. It's awkward, because he's blindfolded and shirtless and just waiting for Caroline to do something, to show even a tiny sign that she hasn't just slipped out and left him there, but all in all, it's. It's alright. He stays where he is.

It must be a minute or two before he feels Caroline's presence again, this time in the form of a quick hand undoing his belt, pulling it out in one swift motion and vanishing again.

He can still hear those little far-off noises—a TV host, a door slamming shut against its frame—but they're muffled by the solid background of his own breathing. It's not panting or anything, he's nowhere near that point yet, but it's a steady string of sound in the silence that surrounds him, louder in his ears than any neighbor's radio or the girls giggling down the street.

Caroline can probably catch their every word.

Caroline, no matter where she is in the room, in the _house_ , can probably also hear every hitch in his throat, every intake of air, every reaction he has to her or to being where he is, willingly helpless and more than a little embarrassed. His jeans are riding low on his hips, threatening to go down save for how tight they feel, and Caroline's keeping quiet—for all he knows, she could be laughing at him, or worse, losing control.

Except she wouldn't. He knows that. He trusts that. She might laugh, but he trusts her to remain aware, to not be a danger to him. It's fucked up and self-centered to think it, considering he asked her to go all supernatural creature on him, to make that extra effort. In his defense, he didn't mean right away.

Right now, every thing he is or could be feeling has been scrambled into an adrenaline rush, full of curiosity and fear and shame and manifesting as an electrical current running over his body. It's the adrenaline rush he lost somewhere between Caroline making sure it was okay for her to do what he'd asked tonight and Caroline making sure it was okay to turn his training experiment into a sex game.

After a while, he coughs pointedly, and Caroline offers an audible breath. "Having second thoughts?" she asks, more of a hiss than proper words.

"Are you?" he says. "'Cause sometimes it feels like you've gone somewhere."

"Still here. I'm not leaving. I'm just not breaking character."

"Really? Because I—I can't _see_ you, but I can feel you trying not to laugh."

Caroline laughs then, sharp and detached and somehow, deep down, warm and giddy. It's a really weird combo of implications. "I can see you getting hard, so. I don't think you have much of a case here." That puts things into perspective.

"I wasn't complaining, Caroline."

"Take off your pants," she interrupts. There's no fondness in that one. It's a plain order, delivered so cleanly he feels his chest tense up.

"You put a blindfold on me," he says. "What if they catch around my feet and I break my hand trying to hold on to something?"

"Undressing in the dark is really not rocket science. You've done it a million times," Caroline reminds him, but then there are small hands on his sides, coming from behind. They're not cold, but they feel cool, coolish, which means his skin's a lot warmer than he realized. He breathes in, and Caroline says, "I'll hold you," which is far more embarrassing than it would have been to just do what she said, and settles in his stomach like a minefield. "Now take off your pants."

"Can't you—" he tries.

Caroline leans in and blows softly on his ear, her hair tickling his collarbone. When she whispers, "I said take off your pants," it's steady and enunciated, leaving no room for saying no.

Popping the button and dragging the zipper down is the easy part. After that, he has two options: try to push them down and step out of them, which is not possible with the jeans he's wearing right now, not without wriggling, or bend over and get them off the way he usually does, which wouldn't be at all weird if it wasn't for the freaking blindfold. Of course, the fact it feels weird to do it like this also makes it stupidly hot, and he has to swallow a moan in the process. He hopes she'll chalk it up to the effort. He also kind of hopes she won't.

"Your underwear, too," Caroline says. "Not that the whole tenting thing isn't adorable, trust me, but I want you naked."

He almost asks what for, but there's something about her tone that makes him want to get to whatever the purpose of this is instead of ask about it. He makes it quick, pulling his boxers down and kicking them off, and he feels Caroline's hands draw a circle around his back and chest and she steps around him. They don't disappear this time; she runs them down his stomach and back up, stopping around the base of his neck.

"Tell me how this feels," she says, and suddenly there's a whirl of movement and a flash of pain as his face slams into a wall. It feels like he's been thrown at it, except that's not possible, because he's still steady on his feet, and his body doesn't hurt past the initial impact.

She carried him here. In some weird way he can't even picture, too fast to see even if he'd been looking, she must have grabbed him and run him across the room, and now she's standing behind him again, her entire body pressed up against his back. He can feel the cotton of her top all along his spine, the roughness of her denim shorts on his ass. She's fully dressed, and that makes him feel even more naked. He's not in a vulnerable state of mind yet, but if that's what she's hoping to achieve, he doesn't know that he can prevent—

He stills. There are teeth on his arm, beneath his shoulder. Sharp teeth that turn sharper and sharper until he can distinctly feel two of them, pointing not so much _at_ as _into_ his skin.

They're not sinking in, just scraping down to his elbow, and then up his forearm when Caroline bends his arm up and holds his hand to the wall, his palm and inner wrist left in the open. He knows she's not going to bite him, he knows that, but when her mouth lingers around the veins on his wrist, he's honestly terrified.

"Would you let me feed on you?" Caroline says, and her voice sounds alien to his ears. It's throaty and raw and actually kind of scary. "You let me once. Right here." When she kisses his wrist, she doesn't give him time to feel relief before setting her fangs up against his neck. That's also pretty fucking frightening. "Would you let me again?"

"You don't want to cross that line," he says, trying and failing to keep his voice even.

" _Would you_?" she presses. She sounds angry.

"No." His breathing's all over the place now, but that's what she's looking for, that has to be it. He's not sure it's true on his end, except it has to be, because they're together in this: he knows she'd regret it, and he wouldn't want that to happen. "No," he repeats, more confidently.

"Good," Caroline says, tracing shapes along his collarbone with her teeth. "Never, _never_ let me feed on you."

"I take vervain with breakfast," he points out, again. This time, acknowledgment only comes in the form of a hand set flat against his stomach, and everything comes rushing back: where he is, what Caroline's doing, the things it's doing to him. Every other second, his cock grazes the wall. It doesn't hurt, but it's not a good feeling, and _still_ , despite that, despite everything, he's pretty sure he's smearing pre-come on the wall. That's maybe the worst part, the way fear is only spiking his arousal.

"What if," Caroline growls. He can't feel her teeth anymore, but she sounds like her fangs haven't retreated yet. Her fingertips flutter around his stomach and drop to his hipbone when she stops talking; the lower they go, down until she's crouching and her hand is on his knee, further away from his cock than it was to begin with, rubbing the outside of his thigh, the _inside_ of his thigh, the more he becomes painfully aware of how hard he is, how much he needs her to stop playing and touch him. "What if," she repeats, and he groans out loud. Caroline's hand disappears for a second and settles back on his arm. "What if I refused to touch you," she goes on, following up by grabbing his other arm and bending them behind his back, clasping his wrists together, "or let you touch yourself, unless you let me bite you?"

It's near impossible to think like this.

"Matt?" Caroline says. There's almost a touch of humanity in her voice, but it's not there anymore when she adds, "Is this a difficult question?" One of her hands leaves his wrists. He tries to move, but even one-hand, her grip is too strong to break. It's useless to even try. "You need any help?" Fuck, he needs to answer.

"Blood donations," he blurts out.

"Is that a suggestion?" There's a hint of amusement in her tone, but he forgets to read any more into it when she runs a fingertip along the length of his cock.

"No," he tries. His voice is shaking; his throat feels dry. "It's supposed to make you dizzy, donating blood."

She makes a loose ring with her thumb and forefinger, not even letting them touch, and circles his cock with it, giving him so little friction his eyes close within the blindfold out of sheet frustration. "So?"

"If," he tries again, "if someone takes—takes a lot of blood from you, you'd be too weak to enjoy the sex anyway."

She steps back, or away, or something. All he knows is they're not touching anywhere anymore. "Was that a joke? I thought I told you not to do that," she says after a second. It must have been a step back: she sounds like she's still close by.

"Sort of," he says, "but still a reason—a reason to say no, right?" He's trying to sound confident, but he's close to panting and it's just impossible to talk through it. He places the wall again and turns on his feet. "How long is the blindfold staying on?"

"I haven't decided yet." Her fangs are gone from her voice. "Until you make me come once, at least. I like you like this."

Matt grinds his teeth together a moment, and uses a hand to massage his jaw, soothe it. It must have hit the wall harder than he thought. "Okay," he says, "tell me what to—"

What stops him is another rush of motion and displacement. When it ends, he's lying down on his back. He recognizes his bed beneath him, and notices something else weighing down the mattress beside him that can only be Caroline.

Something pokes at lip. "Open up," Caroline says, and his jaw drops down under the pressure before he even thinks about it. "That's my thumb," she explains, not that it was hard to tell, "suck on it."

He swirls his tongue over the nail before closing his lips around it. Caroline's weight shifts around for a while—he can feel it in the changing angle of her wrist, and he can hear her shorts sliding down, then hitting the floor. Then there's even more shifting—up to his pillow, next to his head, and soon enough he realizes that's her knees at both sides.

Her thumb slides out, rubbing at his bottom lip and touching his cheek before letting go completely. The bed moves again, and then there's warmth over and around his face. She's so close he can smell her, and he tilts his chin up expectantly, breathing her in.

"Come on," he whines, and she lowers herself on his face until his chin feels wet and he can reach her with his tongue.

"Don't come from this," she says. It sounds like a warning, and it makes his cock twitch. She's justified in asking. The main reason he doesn't answer in words is he's licking his way around her, mapping her out from taste and texture, and he doesn't want to stop. When she adds, "And don't use your hands," he's mouthing at her entrance, pressing his tongue in, and it catches her at the end of a sentence in a way he can hear her voice break, give way to a strangled moan.

She's the one who started this, but he's surprised by how into it she is, how wet she is already, the way her hips move with a slow regularity that seems unconscious, slicking up his mouth, rubbing her clit on his tongue. Judging from the composed way she's been acting, he expects it to last a good while, but she's so built up already he feels like he's barely started before she's grasping at the wall, hands a dry thump when they land on it, and her hips start jerking shakily, and she's letting out _ah_ s that sound like she tried to hold them in.

It's so soon he almost misses it, almost misses the long, whiny moan that sometimes pops out of her mouth when she's been waiting a long, long time for her orgasm.

Once he catches on, he licks more softly at her, quiet and careful until she whimpers and pulls off, kneeling away down his body. She kisses him when she settles on his hips, not low enough to touch him, and sneaks a hand between their bodies, giving his cock a couple of slow tugs as she nips at his lip.

When his eyes open again, he can actually see her.

Sort of see her, at least, through his eyelids and mixed with blobs of color as his eyes adjust to the dim light. He takes it a fraction at a time, squinting up at her until the vague shadow becomes a little less vague. The blinds are open now, and moonlight's pouring in, but it still takes him a while to get used to it. He moves his hands up to Caroline's waist to place her, and tries to keep his eyes open for five seconds, watching the corners of her mouth turn slightly upwards. He drops his lids after that effort, and keeps them closed for about as long.

There's no time for it, no time, but when he opens his eyes, he jumps.

Or, he would, if he could, but the effort's there: Caroline's looking back at him, but there are fangs in her mouth and veins around her eyes and violence in her expression, and he can't help trying to get away when she lunges for his neck.

It's impossible. It's literally impossible. His hands are back on his sides, pinned down, and her thighs are clasped around his hips, holding him down. Her teeth are scraping his collarbone, and he tries to breathe without moving. She's not going to bite him. Even if she did, there's vervain in his system. She wouldn't be able to drink for long. And she drank from him once, but he's still alive, which means she was able to tear herself away from him once, so there's no way she's going to kill him now, now that she can control it better, now that she—

"Got your scare?" Caroline asks, still transformed, and sinks down on his cock.

He thought she was about to sink her _teeth_ into his neck, when she moved, so this is—not as bad as that, if still unexpected. He lets out a curse and, shutting his eyes tightly, tries to take in some air. It goes down in abrupt bouts, like his throat's a bumpy road.

He hears her laugh, and tries to refocus.

"Want me to turn back?" Caroline says, and for a second he thinks she means back to her human face, and wants to say yes. But she looks human again already, and the no doesn't come as easily.

"I—don't know," he says, letting his hips jerk up into her, chase her rhythm now that she's not holding his hips down. He doesn't even care if she turns back. He's not scared enough of her; he's not at all beyond fucking her when her face is contorted into sharp teeth and hunger. That's not a good thing, but he can't—god, it feels so good.

"Well, it's your fucked-up training exercise," she says. He can't tell if she's trying to keep in character or, like, channeling her inner ruthless vampire, he doesn't even know, or if she's genuinely annoyed with him over—oh.

"It is," he says. "You can do whatever you want. If I—if I freak out, that's my fault, that's on me. I don't want you to—to feel bad or—"

"I don't feel anything," Caroline says, too quickly to be true. She's an awful liar; he can't believe she managed to hide this from him for even a minute. "I was just saying."

He nods, and brings his hands up to her thighs. They stay there for maybe three seconds before Caroline's pinned them to the bed again. "What?"

Caroline bites her lip. She looks kind of bashful, which is a little funny considering what she's doing, but her face turns cold again. He wonders if she went through those changes when she was manhandling him around the room, or if it's his being able to see her that's affecting her. "It's still really hard to control it," Caroline says, somehow making it sound like the solid reason it is instead of like the apology he's sure she feels it as, "so you're hopefully never going to see me like that again. But if you want cold and unfeeling, I guess you can—stay still. Let me use you." She punctuates that by rolling her hips until he gasps. "Sit up a little," she adds, but she doesn't let him do it before she's done it for him, pulling him up so quickly he can barely process it, and sitting up with him. Then, she leans forward over him and sets her hands flat on the wall just over and around his head, bringing his up too, holding them up over his head, and her hips start moving again. "Let me ride you," she says, ducking her head to nip at his jaw. "And don't come until I say you can."

He tilts his head up in an effort to draw her attention away from the way all the muscles in his stomach seize up at that order, reining him in at the same time Caroline clenches around his dick, nearly undoing him. It's sudden and unnecessary, almost like she's testing him, but so fucking good.

"I know I'm not the only one who's been close a while," Caroline says, meeting his mouth halfway in something that's not so much a kiss as an exchange of air through an intermittent brushing of lips.

"You're the only one who's enough of an asshole to be happy to keep me waiting," Matt says, trying on the tone. It's not—it doesn't feel right, talking back, and he's not all that surprised when he gets a slap across the face for it. "Fuck." She lets go of one of his hands, and he lifts it to his cheek. It hurts; it's not like he imagines it could hurt, it's not a supernatural amount of pain, but he can feel his skin redden, and—fuck.

"Want another?" she asks, and covers his other cheek with a solid wall of buzzing pain before he has a chance to answer. Even then, he doesn't say a word, concentrating instead on holding back, sneaking that free hand between their bodies to squeeze at the base of his cock, slow himself down.

She doesn't stop moving, slamming her hips down against his knuckles once and again before he moves his hand to her waist. She lets out a long, broken moan and leans forward again, hiding the last of it in his mouth.

"Sorry," she says, muffled, sounding more like herself than she has all night, and then his hand is back on the wall. Her mouth falls open along his jaw as she rolls her hips again, slower for a few last thrusts, and then she's coming again, hot and wet and squeezing his dick so perfectly he's almost sure he's not going to be able to keep it together. "Don't," she says then, suddenly, followed by a long breath, "don't let go yet," and he manages it.

"Okay," he chokes out, mostly for his own benefit, feeling hazy, nearly dizzy from how on edge he is.

"Keep your hands up," she says, letting go of them, "and close your eyes." When he does, the weight of her body leaves both him and the mattress. His fingers twist together into tangled fists against the wall, and he presses his lids shut through the rustle of fabric, her steps, a moment where her foot stamps on the floor, like she lost balance.

It's strange, being able to hear her now, hear the bed squeak when she kneels up at his feet, holding his ankles down. His legs straighten out uncomfortably under the pressure, beside her half-closed knees.

"I'm not gonna touch you," he hears, amused and assured but no longer authoritative, not as intense as before, like she knows he's listening closely, character and vampirism aside, "and you're not gonna touch you, and I don't care if you open your eyes or keep them closed—but you can come now. You know, if you want."

"If I—" he echoes, but stops talking in favor of drawing in air and looking at Caroline. She's dressed again, sitting back on her heels and facing him. She's at his feet, technically, but he knows she could turn him around, throw him across the room, anything if she wanted to. Her gaze is heavy on him, controlling only in a way that's comfortable, comfortable like it's comfortable when she sits on his lap or rests her head on his chest, but there's a flash of leftover power in it that's a little scary, an awareness of the things she can do to him that _wants_ to do them.

She stays where she is, unmoving except for her eyes. She watches him, lets her gaze rummage over his body, and he feels like it's pulling at strings, working him up even after he shuts his eyes again. It builds up in his stomach and spreads over like a constant beat, like his orgasm is being strummed out of him. His entire body is sweating, and Caroline's just thumbing circles around his ankles, waiting.

"Want me to manhandle you some more?" Caroline says, soft and teasing, and he pictures it, pictures that moment earlier when she was pressed up against his back, pinning him to the wall, running her hand up his thigh, and that's all it takes, all he needs to spill all over his stomach, still untouched.

Somehow, it feels like one of the most exhaustingly physical orgasms he's ever had.

When he comes to, Caroline's sitting with her knees bent beneath her, beside his chest, feet just off the bed, and she has a hand on his collarbone, fingers rubbing the side of his neck.

"Thinking about biting?" Matt says, more a drowsy drawl than anything else. Her face looks pensive, brows furrowing slightly and eyes a little narrowed. His own lids drop down a tad to match them, lazy and kind of dazed, opposite to Caroline's quiet concentration.

"No," Caroline says, "I don't want to ruin the moment by rolling around in pain," and cocks her head, smirking and dragging her hand down to his chest. "Was any of that even a little bit scary?"

"Some of it," he says, lifting an arm to run his fingers through her hair.

"Whatever it was, it clearly wasn't scary enough to kill your hard-on," Caroline points out.

"I really don't see that as a bad thing," he says, pulling her down for a kiss.

She sighs against his mouth and whispers, "We can try again sometime. I guess I'm just—a little afraid. Afraid to scare you."

"I was surprised you took me up on it so fast," Matt says, fighting off a yawn. He's definitely tired now. "You didn't have to."

"I can—I mean, I can try to do it. For real. If you still want me to."

"I hope you don't mean right now, 'cause I'm about to pass out," he says. "But we can _talk_ about it. Probably what we should have done in the first place."

"Want me to leave before you fall asleep, come back before you wake up?" she offers. "That could potentially be pretty freaky."

Matt laughs. "Not really," he says, shrugging. "Just stay."


End file.
